Finding a Marcus Garvey Lesson plan was not easy. Ultimately, I ended up creating my own lesson plan to teach my kids about Marcus Garvey. Our homeschool curriculum is heavily focused on African-centered living and learning. For that reason, it is essential that my kids have a good understanding of the role our ancestors, like Marcus Garvey, have played in history both in American and abroad. I designed this Marcus Garvey lesson plan to give my kids a visual, hands-on and interactive understanding of Jamaica’s greatest civil right leader. I hope you will enjoy.

Step 1: Visualize with this Marcus Garvey Video & Flash Cards

My kids and I watched this video twice and also used the website and app StudyBlue to create flashcards to review Marcus Garvey’s life daily. Click here for the flashcards.

Step 2: Read Marcus Garvey Children’s Books & Write

Here are a few books to include in your Marcus Garvey lesson plan. For our lesson plan, we read the book Garvey’s Children: The Legacy of Marcus Garvey and I had the children summarize what they read. My kids are in 2nd and 3rd grade so I walked them through the summarizing process. Here is a graphic organizer to help your kids summarize.

Step 3: Interact through building

For this portion of our Marcus Garvey lesson plan we made our own Black Star Line ships. We made our boats out of aluminum pans, construction paper and straws. It was fun. However, they did not float. I would suggest using this craft to make your boats out of twigs. (Click here)

I hope this will prove useful. Whether you are homeschooling or just want to teach your kids some African history after school or on the weekends, this Marcus Garvey lesson plan is a great resource. Thanks for reading!

Muffy Mendoza is an author, speaker and founder of Pittsburgh Brown Mamas, a support group for nearly 4,000 African-American moms in the Pittsburgh region. To further fill the void Muffy has created a line of educational products focused on helping Black moms be the best moms, too. Her first book, The Brown Mama Mindset: A Blueprint for Black Moms on Life, Love & Home, was featured at the 2018 Essence Festival and is currently sold in various cities across the U.S. Muffy champions the beauty of Black motherhood everywhere she goes, even on the TEDx stage. Find out more about Muffy on muffymendoza.com.